Pinning the Tail on the Donkeys

Santa Burt found another present in his sack. After you read this article, he hopes you’ll enjoy Notions.

There are so many bad things one can say about those on the Left, one hardly knows where to begin. But one of their most annoying traits is that they absolutely refuse to acknowledge that they’ve ever been wrong even when actual events, as opposed to the fiction so often spun by liberal professors and historians, confirms it time and again.

Whitaker Chambers

For instance, when I was a youngster, Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers testified that Alger Hiss, the fair-haired boy of FDR’s and Truman’s State Department, was not only a member of the Communist Party, but an agent of the Soviet Union. The way that the Left erupted, you might have thought that Chambers was a latter-day Pontius Pilate and that Hiss was Jesus. Even when the Soviet Union released the Venona Papers years later, proving that Hiss had indeed been one of their agents — in other words, a traitor, one of Stalin’s useful idiots — the Left refused to acknowledge their collective naïveté.

Along the same lines, one never heard the likes of NY Times foreign correspondent Walter Duranty, playwright Lillian Hellman or film director Abe Polansky, ever acknowledge that they’d been dangerously mistaken in paying homage to Joe Stalin. And when did you ever hear of Hollywood’s lefties beg anyone’s pardon for tithing the Soviet Union or acknowledging that long before any of them had been blacklisted, they had engaged in blacklisting conservative screenwriters such as Morrie Ryskind?

Alger Hiss

Did any of those on the Left ever denounce their younger selves for insisting during the Cold War that the United States should have unilaterally disarmed itself of nuclear bombs, thus setting, as they fatuously claimed, a good example for the Russians?

Did any of those louts ever declare a mea culpa for demanding that Ronald Reagan be impeached if, for nothing else, referring to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and then regurgitating their moral outrage all over again when George W. Bush declared that Iran, North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, constituted an “axis of evil”?

Apparently nothing ticks off a leftist more than calling a spade a garden utensil.

Anyone with a frontal lobe recognizes that the economic chaos in Europe is the direct result of socialist nanny states promising to provide their citizens with all their material needs in exchange for over-inflating the size of government. And yet lunkheads like Obama, Pelosi, Waxman and Reid, refuse to recognize the predictable results of these idiotic policies even when confronted with the inevitable riots every night on the evening news.

One definition of insanity is constantly repeating the same action in the cockeyed belief that the results will eventually be different. In the case of Leftists, if you point out that socialism doesn’t work any better in Wisconsin or Ohio than it did in the Soviet Union or does in Greece, they argue that it simply has never been done correctly. In the wake of such bloody failures as China, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, only a certifiable lunatic would even consider defending socialism on such shaky ground. However, when it comes to unequivocal devotion to failed attempts at social engineering, those on the Left could give collies and cocker spaniels lessons in blind loyalty.

If I haven’t yet convinced you that those who inhabit the ranks of the Left are dangerously self-righteous and unbelievably stupid, consider that they not only elected Barney Frank to Congress, but then kept doing it 15 more times. Consider, too, that they hold the unholy likes of Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore and Michael Bloomberg, in high regard.

Finally, never forget that one of the intellectual heroines of the Left, Susan Sontag, once declared, “The white race is the cancer of human history,” and, as usual, she was being deadly serious; and that Barack Obama, after once acknowledging that America was the greatest nation on the face of the earth — no doubt with his fingers crossed behind his back — went on to announce that, as president, he intended to radically transform it!

Author Bio:

Burt Prelutsky, a very nice person once you get to know him, has been a humor columnist for the L.A. Times and a movie critic for Los Angeles magazine. As a freelancer, he has written for the New York Times, Washington Times, TV Guide, Modern Maturity, Emmy, Holiday, American Film, and Sports Illustrated.
For television, he has written for Dragnet, McMillan & Wife, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Bob Newhart, Family Ties, Dr. Quinn and Diagnosis Murder. In addition, he has written a batch of terrific TV movies. View Burt’s IMDB profile.
Talk about being well-rounded, he plays tennis and poker... and rarely cheats at either.
He lives in the San Fernando Valley, where he takes his marching orders from a wife named Yvonne and a dog named Angel.Author website: http://www.burtprelutsky.com/

Nice arltcie, thanks. I shoot wedding videos, never thought there was anything i can do to correct hiss on a bad recording, Will try this out.

David Chambers

Mr. Prelutsky,

You wrote:

“Even when the Soviet Union released the Venona Papers years later, proving that Hiss had indeed been one of their agents — in other words, a traitor, one of Stalin’s useful idiots — the Left refused to acknowledge their collective naïveté.”

Larry: And now that George Soros has apparently targeted the Girl Scouts with his brand of treason, you have to wonder what they’re going to start putting into their cookies.

Burt

Larry Wallace

I appreciate your articles Burt and your take on the blindness the left exhibits when it comes to the inability of socialism to actually work in any society–it has failed the masses everytime it’s been in place. Whittaker Chambers wonderful book “Witness”, which should be read by all who call themselves conservatives, really opened my eyes to the subtle and not so subtle creeping of socialism into our government and national fabric of everyday life–mostly through public school indoctrination.

Shirl

We need a leader who won’t fall for the guilt trip the liberals always try to play and the pc-bs.

Burt Prelutsky

Glen: I wouldn’t give up hope. Jimmy Carter was a huge disaster, but, aside from his opening the door to the Ayatollah Khomeini and the jihadists, America managed to survive his four years. Of course it helped that we had Ronald Reagan in the wings, but even he signed the amnesty bill that opened the floodgates for illegal aliens to pour through.

Burt

Glen Stambaugh

And transform it he has. Amazing what can be accomplished within the context of a crisis. We’ll be forever picking out the seeds he’s been planting the last 3 years. As with my lawn, I can kill most weeds, but some resist my every strategy and effort until I resign myself and accept it as part of the fauna. We are transformed.

Burt Prelutsky

DOOM: You’re right to bring up human nature. That is the thing that Utopians never take into consideration.

Shirl: It totally confounds me when Leftists tell us how stupid Reagan was and how brilliant Obama is.

Burt

DOOM161

The simple fact is that socialism cannot be run the way the left wants it to be run (correctly, as they say) and that’s why it’s never happened.

Human nature is, if there isn’t a reason to work, you’re going to conserve your energy. That’s why, if we take Swedes at their word, they are the sickest nation in the modern world. On any given day, 20% of Swedish workers call in sick. Surprisingly, this happens most often on Mondays and Fridays.

A few years ago, the Swedish government began running out of other people’s money. With the tax rate at 52%, the government figured that they wouldn’t be able to get more money out of the taxpayers. So they considered taxing their time, forcing them to do janitorial work and the like in government buildings. I don’t know in what world slavery is a good alternative to capitalism.

I use Sweden as an example because it’s the best example of socialism that leftists have.

Shirl

You win the game, Burt cause you pinned them exactly right! Was watching some influencial accademics on c-span just yesterday discussing President Reagan. Seems the Soviets were worried about eminent war from the US and he commented; “what could they possibly have that we would want?” but just like socialized medicine, Obama is trying to give us socialism too. How can anyone really care about American and peddle this evil.